Struggling to come up with the exact word I need for this tweet — a word that I had in my automatic, immediate vocabulary when I was in college — makes me wonder…does our vocabulary go through natural selection as we get older? I would imagine so, as I am very much struggling to remember a word I used a million times on papers, a word that was fluff then and has since been eliminated as a direct result of this fact. I’m sure I impressed countless professors with this word — I’m sure I used it on that paper I got a B+ on without even reading the book (I think it was Tess of the D’Urbervilles). That might’ve been the paper I needed to completely rewrite because the night before it was due, my laptop was stolen from under my nose at the Penn Station metrocard machine. Possibly.

Either way I can’t check it because my laptop was stolen again a few years later and ahhh…I wish I could. Anyway, throughout remembering my probably shitty paper I remembered the word: quintessential.